Guilty if charged: you don’t want to face Russia’s judges

Judges in Russia’s courts system are extremely unlikely to let you offMAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS

Not guilty are words seldom heard in Russian criminal courtrooms, especially now that new statistics published by Russia’s supreme court revealed that less than one in 100 cases end in an acquittal.

Acquittal rates in criminal cases currently stand at just 0.34 per cent – a figure more than 20 times lower than during Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror, when one in every 10 defendants was cleared in open trials.

Some Russian judges go through their entire careers without ever acquitting a defendant.

Yekaterina Shoponyak, a judge who recently convicted a video blogger who filmed himself catching Pokémon in a cathedral, has not returned a single not guilty verdict during her career of almost two decades.